In praise of ... airships

Anyone who tries to praise airships (as the Guardian's George Monbiot did last year) has to confront a bundle of historical prejudices - half-remembered black-and-white images of the skeleton of Britain's crashed R101 in France, and the Nazis' Hindenburg bursting into flames as it tried to dock in New Jersey. Since then, with a few small exceptions, airships have been swept from the skies by jet aircraft. It is time for a comeback. They will never match planes for speed. But they are ideally suited to long-distance, low-carbon air transport, especially for cargo - less polluting than planes or ships. Britain could be a leader at producing them, too, if the industry could secure enough backing to develop prototypes from test models now being built. One company, Hybrid Air Vehicles, based in Cardington (which is where the R101 was once built), says it is ready to build an aircraft that could carry 200 tonnes of cargo for 3,200 nautical miles, at four times the speed of a typical modern cargo ship. The firm is searching for the €50m it needs to put a demonstration model in the skies. Airship technology has come a long way since the 1930s: no more combustible hydrogen (although helium has less lift), and, in the proposed SkyCat design, a docking system evolved from a hovercraft that would get rid of the need for mooring winches and cables. Will it work? The way to find out is to build one. This is the sort of high-skilled, green industry Britain needs to develop. The chancellor should lend a hand tomorrow.